LeMU.waterbottle

Echo­ing recent event (in rl), I think it is a less than per­fect tim­ing to cook up a regional tour to be a more patri­otic citizen… of the Cal­dari State.

In EVE Online, Stand­ing with the four major Empires is a numeric indi­ca­tor of how much they like you, the cap­suleer pilot.  A higher stand­ing with a par­tic­u­lar empire fac­tion doesn’t do a lot: granting you access of higher level mis­sion agents; use­ful if you decide to do mis­sions for another NPC corp within that fac­tion.  A neg­a­tive stand­ing will, induc­tively, will make your life a tad bit mis­er­able in spaces con­trolled by that fac­tion.  If your stand­ing hits –5.0, your very intru­sion to that faction’s ter­ri­tory will sum­mon NPC police force whose goal is to destroy your ship and laugh at your wreck.

con­tinue reading…

It appears that I have played Mabinogi on the wrong side of the hori­zon.  The above incred­i­bly com­posed cos­play is the alleged event win­ner in Mabinogi Tai­wan.  This piece is cer­tainly among the most fab­u­lous multi-character cos­play I’ve ever come across… and yes indeed, my uminkeo fan­bo­ism also prevails.

Though I am not play­ing Mabinogi any­more at this moment, I am con­stantly look­ing for signs of that would reju­ve­nate my faith in dev­cat so one day I may once again be moti­vated enough to resume my Fan­tasy Life.  I made three conditionals:

• When I have time
• When dev­cat revamps party sys­tem so the game is no longer “Solonogi”
• When dev­cat fixes abuses/exploits in end-game stuff (such as black­smith near-perfect)

So I say to myself, if two of the three above con­di­tions are met, I’ll be back to the game; sadly I don’t see that hap­pen any­time soon.  Or… worse, dev­cat became demented–for intro­duc­ing Ham­let into C4G13’s main­stream.  Yes, Ham­let, Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

con­tinue reading…

One com­po­nent of EVE Online’s back­ground story-building mech­a­nism is the numer­ous offi­cial short fic­tions named EVE Chron­i­cles post on the offi­cial web­site as the offi­cial canon of the game.  Though I feel the sci­en­tific arti­cles are gen­er­ally more inter­est­ing to read, some of the Chron­i­cles no doubt have stood out for being bril­liantly written.

All These Lives are Fit to Ruin, writ­ten by CCP Abraxas, is one of the bet­ter chron­i­cles.  It addresses some of the curios­ity regard­ing the sup­pos­edly imper­sonal rela­tion­ship of Cap­suleer and his crew mem­bers.  The impres­sion of “pod pilots can fly­ing all size of ships solo”, is a jus­ti­fi­able one, how­ever it is incor­rect in theory.

And… the fol­low­ing copy&paste of the Chron­i­cle is for those who find read­ing a white wall of text over a black back­ground an excru­ci­at­ing activity.

As a lazy per­son I find it more than lovely to stum­ble on an article–one which talks about a topic that I intended to write about.  It is even more so when the arti­cle cap­tures my feel­ings in exact, so all I need to do is to post the link and be done with it.

http://www.massively.com/2010/06/06/eve-evolved-what-not-to-expect-from-eve-online/
by Bren­dan Drain

I’ve been read­ing stuff on MMO news sites when there’s noth­ing to do for work.  Out of the few pop­u­lar ones, Mas­sively, which the above arti­cle is hosted, is clearly pump­ing out higher qual­ity and more thought­ful columns.  Inter­est­ingly enough, many of Mas­sively read­ers are either fans or “crit­ics” of EVE Online, an MMO I’ve been “play­ing” for the past month.

If there is such thing as MMO otaku (yes, the irony), I’d say EVE Online is one of the must-play game due to its dis­tinct mechan­ics and unwa­ver­ing drive to pop­u­lar­ity.  Indeed, many aspects of EVE can be refresh­ing to tra­di­tional MMORPG play­ers such as myself…  You are in a sin­gle game world com­posed of web of nodes of human habi­tants and their host solar sys­tems.  You, the player, are rep­re­sented as the space­ship you are dri­ving, instead of a 3D model of a man or a woman that lives 20,000 years into the future from our time.  You can (legit­i­mately) exchange in-game money and sub­scrip­tion time via in-game mar­ket.  Last but not least, you are to observe the game’s learn­ing curve as of following:

Dis­claimer: I did not pro­duce this image; it is not rep­re­sen­ta­tive of my opin­ion and I will not be held respon­si­ble for any brain cell loss for attempts made to com­pre­hend this graph.

con­tinue reading…

A rare show­case of gen­eros­ity for Nexon and per­haps online game devel­op­ers in gen­eral: Hangame JP released an offline demo of Dragon Nest as its open-beta date draws near.  Hangame JP is noto­ri­ous for its almost xeno­pho­bic ip restriction.  Yes, they’ve done it to their Dragon Nest offi­cial site.  BUT,  Thanks and lolis are given to Steparu for the won­der­ful and tim­ing news for the offline demo!

Since I won’t put up with the bother of set­ting up a proxy, all infor­ma­tion regard­ing the offline demo are inferred from the offline demo ver­sion itself.  In case you have no idea what I’ve been talk­ing about, steparu’s loli man­sion has some very detailed stuff regard­ing Dragon Nest.

This demo ver­sion includes the four lv16 char­ac­ters for each class, a train­ing course map, and two dun­geon maps (with easy and nor­mal dif­fi­culty).  Since the char­ac­ters are pre­set, there is no level up and/or dis­trib­ute skill points.  For those who are interested, the demo is dubbed in Japan­ese (how­ever unim­pres­sive).  The “story” starts as you being the hero to save a girl who went into for­est and encoun­tered dan­ger <Insert hack­neyed plot here>.  Not to pass overly harsh judge­ment at an early stage here but I just hope the shal­low story in this demo does not rep­re­sent the fin­ished product.

Actu­ally try­ing out the game con­firmed most of my pre­vi­ous assump­tions got­ten from watch­ing game­play videos.  The char­ac­ter ani­ma­tion, light­ning, physics, and cam­era, are excel­lent as expected.  On the other hand, textures–especially tex­ture for char­ac­ters, are very rough; so, has any­body won­dered… is there a con­vinc­ing rea­son for Eye­Den­tity not to pol­ish this aspect of their game just a lit­tle bit more?

Maybe because it was lit­er­ally my first time play­ing this kind of action games, the expe­ri­ence was quite chal­leng­ing.  I died 10+ times as War­rior at the last boss; good thing is that there are infi­nite amount of lives to waste away!  Again be reminded, the char­ac­ter skills are pre­de­ter­mined, so it may be hard to stop think­ing “hey why do I have this skill on my bar that doesn’t do me any good?”

con­tinue reading…

No. I did not get a beta key, so I didn’t get to play with real peo­ple… not like I ever wanted at this moment

I. Bet­ter Graphics

Despite peo­ple may call SC2 “car­toony”, its graph­ics lives up to the pres­tige and era.  War­Craft 3 looked good, and I’m happy that this game looks sig­nif­i­cantly bet­ter.  There’s an immense amount of detail to each piece of tex­ture and ani­ma­tion to be dis­cov­ered… which I do when watch­ing AI play­ing against each other~  It’s also a plus which PC with very high to very low specs can run SC2… in dif­fer­ent graph­ics details.

II. Less Microing

The amount of micro-management and the less casual stuff , such as APM, really turns me off from the orig­i­nal Star­Craft.  I now applause the fact that SC2 is more about play­ing the game rather than play­ing a sport.  Don’t get me wrong though, a pro is still a pro with many aspects of play­ing SC2 can be trained opon.  Now it’s really about build, attack, expand, etc… all the macro-management where it is faster to learn and get a grip about.

Again, the game is still in “closed” beta test­ing.  Too bad I don’t get to see yo mommaship’s ownage before she got too fat, lol.  I guess even though her old skill sounds totally over­pow­er­ing, so it’s good to see things got more bal­anced this way.

In con­clu­sion, StarCraft2 does not dis­ap­point me at all; quite amaz­ing, so def­i­nitely I’ll get a copy of the game once it’s released :p